‘We’ll Always Have Paris’ by John Baxter

 Film critic and biographer John Baxter fell in love with a woman, and along with her, a city. After his marriage failed, Baxter, an Australian then living in Los Angeles, rekindled a friendship with a Parisian woman he had known years before. He invited her to visit him in Los Angeles. Now older and wiser, the two fell in love, and within three weeks he was packing to join his Marie-Dominique in the City of Lights.
   In "We’ll Always Have Paris, Sex and Love in the City of Light" (2005, John Baxter, Harper Perennial), we explore the sexier, often steamier, sometimes disquietingly seedy aspects of the beautiful, legendary city through the eyes of a new, admiring fan. From red light districts to public restrooms to body-parts obsessed artists, the tour runs the gamut. Baxter looks at erotica, royal affairs and public scandals. What makes the Frenchwoman so captivating, what is that je ne sais quoi that  women elsewhere slavishly try to imitate? Hint: Though there’s nothing of the Puritan in the typical Parisienne, Baxter says two of her secret weapons are a feline reticence and a willingness to take men as they find them.
   Paris has enthralled and captivated for centuries. It isn’t necessarily an easy city to live in. French bureaucracy can be harder to scale than a high wall and the French don’t extend the collie dog welcome that Americans can excel at, superficial as it may be. But for many outsiders, once seduced by Paris, it’s painful to live elsewhere.
 Baxter has another, more personal story to tell, as well — a family story. A baby enters the plot, and through this tiny person, already French to her toes, he says, the conquest by Paris is complete.